Monster Factory
Monster Factory is a web series available in Polygon.com's official YouTube channel. The show is hosted by Griffin McElroy and his older brother Justin McElroy, Polygon's former senior video producer and editor-at-large, respectively. The show's premise consists of both brothers opening character creation tools from several video and computer games and use their creations in-game as they cause all sorts of havoc. Starting with their Dark Souls II video on May 2015, Monster Factory is Polygon's longest-running series, spanning a total of 65 episodes as of October 3, 2019. The series have also some of the most viewed videos on the website's YouTube channel, behind Unraveled, with the first episode of the Fallout 4 saga having over 1.3 million views. Alongside other Polygon series such as Car Boys and Touch the Skyrim, the series spawned a wealthy fanbase, responsible for a lot of fanart and other content dedicated to the beautiful boys created by the McElroys. Note: Justin and Griffin have made it clear that, in the near future, Polygon's YouTube channel will cease hosting the series, and it will appear exclusively on The McElroy Family channel. At present, the videos are posted on both Polygon's YouTube channel and The McElroy Family channel. Concept The show's main goal is to make use of extensive character creation tools from various video games, regardless of genre. Instead of playing safe, the McElroy brothers, most namely Griffin, exploit all of the properties available in the tools. One well known example is the face generation tool in the Souls series by From Software, which led to the creation of characters like Squirtle and Toucan Dan. One catchphrase coined by the brothers is "no middle sliders" which emphasizes the idea of making the character's face and body parts as exaggerated as possible. As a result most of its creations ended up looking anything but resembling a human being. After the creation, Griffin and Justin take the character to the actual game, exploring the world and harassing NPCs. In some games, mostly Bethesda games', console commands are used to change their creation's stats or even breaking the game. In the case of MMOs, they often make contact with other players, which can end up in disaster for the most part. As they play through the game, their creation earns some character development in the forrm of exploiting abilities and dubs provided by either Justin, Griffin or both. After having enough of the character, a rating is given to their creation, though those ratings in particular are mostly nonsensical and solely an added bonus to the show's quirky humor. An episode's length may vary between 20 and 30 minutes long, and on several occasions it has been split into several parts. Since episode 56, Clayton Ashley has been credited as the editor of the episodes and occasionally makes appearances in text-form. The "Brand" A recurring gag on Monster Factory is the creation of its own brand, which main rule is to have original creations and avoid copyright infringements. The big irony is that a vast amount of original creations are named after real-world and pop culture references. If we stripped down every single character named after and/or based on a real world reference, this would be the list of characters used to promote the brand: * Cousin SpecialAgent * D-Bomb * Boy-Mayor (himself inspired in part by Augustus Gloop) * The Final Pam * Panpan * Rat Baby * Succotash * Jorstin (if we exclude his Randy Savage-based entrance attire) * Mëlissa (whose attire is loosely based on a terrible Sly Cooper cosplay) * Daz (whose initial face came from a picture of actor Dennis Farina) * Trüllbus * JAA'M * Turbovicki * Knife Dad * Jefferson Tallpipe * DJ Slime Time * Todd Coolbody * Dr. Sexgun * Jim Johnman (If we excuse the fact that he was loosely named after Brad Donman) * Tammy Radbody * NanciBudin73 * Snack Braff Episode List [[Todd Coolbody|]] (*) Despite his role in Sweeps Week, Todd Coolbody only makes appearance in the final episode. (**) Denotes a special episode (***) Marks the beginning of the post-Polygon era, where Griffin and Justin had left Polygon, but still posted the videos on Polygon's youtube channel Special Episodes Monster Factory Presents: Just Like Art Main Article: Monster Factory Presents: Just Like Art On August 29th 2017 Griffin and Justin launched the series' official Facebook page, alongside a spin-off of Monster Factory, based around creating pieces of art through exploiting Skyrim. External Links * Official YouTube Playlist * Official Facebook Page Category:Polygon Shows